U.S. lumber prices softened in mid-September on a seasonal lull in construction industry orders during another year in which hopes for strong gains in housing starts were disappointed, industry experts said.

The framing lumber composite price, an industry benchmark published by Random Lengths, a provider of lumber industry data, edged down to $388 per thousand board feet in the week to Sept. 23 from $399 a week earlier.

A monthly measure of the composite, a weighted average of 15 grades of lumber, rose to $401, its highest since April 2013, but the average for the first eight months of 2014 equaled the $384 for all of 2013, indicating supply and demand in lumber market is broadly balanced, according to lumber analysts.

The range-bound recent pattern of lumber prices reflects national housing starts data that have failed to make a sustained break above a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1 million units, as predicted by some analysts at the start of the year. In August, privately owned starts registered 956,000 units, up 8% from a year earlier but down 14.4% from July, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Jim Dermody, president of Seaboard International Forest Products, a Nashua, New Hampshire-based lumber wholesaler that expects to make about $400 million in sales this year, said predictions of a strong upswing in housing starts, and therefore a jump in lumber prices, have been overblown this year and do not look to be much different in 2015.